After tracing the survival and manifestation of interest in the antiquities of Rome from the 5th to the 14th centuries, an attempt is made to show in what ways Petrarch is the precursor of the humanist antiquarians of the early Quattrocento. His writings on Rome, and those of his followers, cannot be isolated from the political realities of 'Babylonish Captivity' and Schism, which for so long frustrated any concerted attempts to rejuvenate Rome, or investigate its antiquities. But the return of Pope Martin V to his native city in September 1420 paved the way to its recovery, and inaugurated a decade of intensive exploration of its ancient remains, undertaken by the artists and humanists who came to Rome from Tuscany and Northern Italy to work for the Pope, or his Cardinals. This study, at the source of rinascita, was to decisively change the course of both Italian art and humanism. Intellectually pre-eminent among the humanists who entered the Curia under Martin V, Poggio Bracciolini, it is argued, was the effective founder in modern times of both field-archaeology and classical epigraphy: disciplines which give the description of Rome inserted into Book I of his De varietate Fortunae its distinctive and original tone. The rival claims made on behalf of either Cola di Rienzo or Nicolo Signorili as founders of epigraphy are shovm to be mistaken. The latter, in his own treatise on Rome, commissioned by the Pope, attempted unsuccessfully, it is suggested, to wed the Roman tradition of communal antiquarianism to the humanistic approach recently introduced into the Curia by Poggio. The death of Martin V in February 1431 precipitated renewed hostilities, which forced Eusenius IV, his successor, into exile, and interrupted the course of archaeology in Rome for over a decade. The Roma instaurata, the treatise composed by his secretary Flavio Biondo, coincides with the Pope's eventual return to the city in September 1443, and reflects his attempts to restore it; its commemoration of the Pope's instauratio accompanies its recovery of Roma antica. The first sustained attempt at a humanist topography of ancient Rorne, Biondo's work draws on a wealth of disparate, and in many cases newly discovered, source material. In its erudition, and in its restoration of what had come to be corrupt, it must rank, it is claimed, as a major contribution not only to Roman topography, but to the historiography of the Renaissance, and the European revival of learning.

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How and why was imperial power made visually and physically manifest in two similar, contemporaneous megastates - the Roman Principate and Qin-Han China? Framing the Chinese and Roman material within such a question breaks it free from the web of expectations and assumptions in which conventional scholarship almost always situates it. It also builds upon the limited but promising work recently undertaken to study these two empires together in a comparative context. The purpose of this thesis is not to discover similarities and differences for their own sake; but, by discovering similarities and differences, to learn about the nature of imperial authority and prestige in each state. The comparative method compels us to appreciate the contingent - and sometimes frankly curious - nature of visual and artefactual phenomena that have traditionally been taken for granted; and both challenges and empowers us to access higher tier explanations and narratives. Roman expressions of power in visual terms are more public, more historical- biographical, and more political, while Qin-Han images and objects related to imperial authority are generally more private, generic and ritual in their nature. The Roman material emphasizes the notional complicity of large groups of people - the imperial subjects who viewed, crafted and often commissioned these works - in maintaining and defining the emperor's power. If the Han emperor's power was the product of complicity, it was the complicity of a small group of family members and courtiers - and of Heaven. These contrasting sets of power relationships connect to a concerted thematic focus, in the case of Rome, on the individual of the princeps; that is, the individual personage and particular achievements - especially military achievements - of the emperor. This focus is almost always taken for granted in Roman studies, but contrasts profoundly with the thematic disposition of Han artefacts of power: these reflect a concentrated disinterest in imperial personality altogether, emphasizing instead the imperial position; that is, both the office of emperor and a cosmic centrality. While this thesis reveals some arresting contrasts, it also harnesses the dichotomous orientations of Roman and Chinese archaeology to reveal that the conventional understanding of much of this material can be misleading or problematic. Many of the differences in the ways such images are usually interpreted have as much to do with the idiosyncrasies and path dependency of two fields - in short as much to do with the modern viewer - as they do with the images themselves and the traditions that produced them.